


Surfing the Rings

by The_Exile



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alien Character(s), Alien Cultural Differences, Gen, Illegal Activities, Jellyfish, Mild Language, Music, Possibly Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-03-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:47:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23081185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Exile/pseuds/The_Exile
Summary: Anna is a human girl in an Academy on board an orbital satellite. Her best friend, Trillium (only a rough translation), is an intelligent, floating, spacefaring rainbow jellyfish who mostly communicates via telepathy and song. While they take part in an illegal race around the planet's rings, they have a lot to talk about, as two very different species both on the cusp of adulthood.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 7
Collections: Space Swap 2020





	Surfing the Rings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hannelore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hannelore/gifts).



Trillium had promised to take Anna ringsurfing today. 

Well, to tell the truth, Trillium wasn't their real name. More accurately, Trillium wasn't the name they would use for themselves - the human narrow concept of reality was one of Trillium's only sore points so Anna tried not to use the word around them. Their full identity was more like a pattern of bright blue light slowly spiralling out from the centre of the darkness of a still night sky in all directions in a kind of three-leafed blossom, accompanied by a a rhythmic sequence of high-pitched chiming melodies, that kind of smelled like springtime and warm games console controllers. They'd managed to telepathically communicate most of this, although some of the time and probability dimensions didn't quite translate into anything a human could understand, or at least not all at once - however, Anna still didn't have the means to say it back. 

That was okay, though, they decided, as Trillium couldn't say 'Anna' either. With no vocal chords to speak of, they tended to project the word directly into Anna's brain (their favourite font was Terminal) and, like a device assigning random colours to a black and white image, hoping they fit and getting it badly wrong, the word tended to be moving and shifting around a black background with random synth rock medleys and, indeed, broad colours. Most probably, the image also contained data on what the name would look like should a slightly different condition have been fulfilled at that particular time, information Anna still didn't understand how to read.

Trillium's concept of 'today' was also rather more flexible than a human's. The Academy had agreed on a standardised system of keeping time, roughly based around the rotations around the sun of the planet it orbited and the progress of its various moons around their parent body. Time was understood to be moving forwards, to be illegal to edit except by the maintenance staff or the Interplanetary Government in an emergency, to be absolute rather than relative to people newly emerging from backup clone vats, and to have only six parallel scenarios for people who could track them, one of which was reserved for maintenance work. Messages from other worlds with different systems were to be considered to have arrived at the time that the clock in the Academy said, although the time displayed in their place of origin was recorded just in case it needed tracking in an emergency. Even with these regulations, Trillium would occasionally be a few days late or swear they already turned up.

This was acceptable, however, as Anna had a lot of problems of her own, such as the fact that she couldn't actually ringsurf. At least, she couldn't safely do so in her own body. She needed to pilot a drone - amusingly to Trillium, the machines they used were roughly Trillium’s own same shape and size but obviously metallic, rather than the consistency of a rainbow jellyfish. Even neurally piloting the thing from its own perspective would not provide the full experience, and would also cause her excruciating motion sickness, so Anna and Trillium had trained for several weeks beforehand to create some kind of useful telepathic link to inject the missing stimulus and simulate all the senses. 

Personally, Anna thought Trillium was being overly perfectionist. Whether it was the 'correct' experience or not, she enjoyed her rides along the planet's largest ring of gas and dust, the sensation of flying free on a current of sound and light, through the beautifully scintillating clouds of purples, reds, browns and oranges, like a permanent sunset along the planet's horizon. Trillium wasn't the only Octopod in the Academy and they tended to float in their intricate formations, rings that spiraled out from the origin, as soon as they met, as if drawn to each other and the tunes that only they could naturally hear, although they were broadcast over the drone's soundsystems. Their translucent bodies pulsed different colours as they moved and spun, blinking on and off, fading from warm to vibrant. A few other species joined them through the drones, not just Anna, although humans were some of the least compatible. They could project lights of their own through several beacons around their spherical bodies but it would never look as majestic. 

Trillium reassured her that the contrast was considered aesthetically pleasing in and of itself, and that more modern Octopod dances often involved placing sequences of non-Octopod objects around the environment anyway. Ringsurfing was definitely the province of the young in mind, with its tendency to end in races and acrobatics that ended in full speed collisions if they made the slightest wrong turn. Octopods were nigh indestructible by anything except true deletion - in fact it was impossible to tell a young Octopod from an older one except by their tendency to think and move slower due to their attitude to life rather than anything slowing them down physiologically. However, the drones got wrecked quite often, to the eternal chagrin of the Academy's Deans - the machines were supposed to be vital environmental surveillance equipment. 

In fact, ringsurfing was supposed to be banned for students outside of the semesterly organised tournaments. Enforcing this in practice worked about as well as stopping a school full of gifted technicians from hacking and making off with the drones constantly. This particular session had been organised after hours by a few of Trillium's close friends, somewhere far away from the Academy, in the wilderness where the mining drones hadn't gotten around to yet. This made it even less safe but that was all part of the fun. 

While they were relatively secluded, Anna had asked Trillium again to show her what an Octopod mating dance looked like. She'd received a series of bright pulses in various shades of pinky red from her friend, the closest they could come to blushing. All the Octopods around Trillium's age were starting to come into their first mating cycle and this was a subject of curiosity, nervousness and embarrassment when they accidentally flashed mating colours at each other. Of even more intense fascination were the sexual customs of species different to their own. Octopods mated communally, every person of age within certain territory boundaries coming together in a massive, slow, intricate dance that hadn't changed since their earliest recorded history - which was itself an unimaginable span of time, Octopods having a biological data memory bank. Through a series of flashing signals, they would all exchange DNA via said memory bank, then they would use the shared energy of the group to cause as many of them to asexually reproduce through cell splitting as they could reasonably manage. Each shoals had to think about the population level and whether they could sustain it, explained Trillium. Quite often, they chose that time to migrate to somewhere else in the galaxy that didn't have too high a population already. 

"All this must be amazing to see," Anna whistled. They spoke over the drone's video messenger, Trillium having a terminal strapped around one of her pseudopods that she didn't use for steering, "So many of you at once, all those colours and music..."

"It would be difficult for a human to observe properly, in the vaccuum of space," replied Trillium, "Besides, it is kept private from even other shoals."

"Yeah, I guess that would make sense. Wouldn't want someone peeking in on me, either," she said.

"I am equally in awe of the way it must be for humans," admitted Trillium, "It sounds so much more private and meaningful. Between the two humans involved, I mean. A mating dance is very... joyful and uplifting but it does not really imply affection."

"You do feel love, though, right?" Trillium's face fell at the thought that Trillium, such a sensation-obsessed aesthete, would be unable to experience what was, to humans, probably always going to be one of their most powerful inspirations in life, no matter how far they expanded across the Universe as their consciousness rapidly broke the shackles of just one earthbound reality.

"I admit, I am still confused as to the exact definition," said Trillium.

"So is everyone," admitted Anna, "Its confusing and awkward as all hell."

"Much more so," argued Trillium, who had apparently decided that 'hell' meant either 'standstill' or 'anticlimax' or both, "I think that in some contexts of the word we feel love and in others we don't."

"So, same as a lot of humans," said Anna. As someone whose parents were at the forefront of the diaspora movement - the whole reason she had gotten into the Academy with such little trouble - she had been brought up with no real concept of love for a homeland, a tradition or a people, for instance. 

An awkward, confusing, perfectly inconvenient and embarrassing love for another person that she had no words to properly express, however...

"Shit! Antimatter storm!" yelled another racer over the emergency intercom. An image of the burgeoning storm over the horizon snapped up on a visual display, a furiously crackling ball of red-streaked black lightning that was rapidly approaching their position, sending a creaking, splitting whine through their soundsystems.

Anna was treated to an impressively colourful - literally - example of Octopod swearing as Trillium darted away, screeching at the girl to follow. Highly concentrated antimatter was one of the few things that could harm data memory storage and therefore permanently mess with an Octopod. It would also brick the drone and, if she was very unlucky, leak into her own data memory signature, meaning that her clone bank registration was in danger. In other words, freak weather conditions like this were the exact reason why it was very much forbidden to fool around in the wilds of a planet's rings. 

This kind of thing always happened to her in the middle of the really interesting conversations...


End file.
